[This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders](https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/wat-verzeepte-regels)
I had a particularly fruitful morning, poetically speaking: I wrote a very good conceptual poem about art, and also the above protest poem that addresses something that has been bothering me for quite some time: exorbitant profits on books—in this case, charging 60 dollars for an ebook, a large portion of which ends up in the pocket of a billionaire. In other words, decades from now, someone could be making money from your work while there are no basic costs involved: you can simply use AI to compile such books.
Your work could thus feed some parasitic entity in the future. In this instance, it’s Jeff’s angry rocket, but maybe it will be an even bigger fascist.
That’s not just bizarre; it’s appalling.
Feng Wenbing is also a somewhat forgotten poet in China. Here, I have “soaped together” various lines of his and added a few things of my own. Some people might consider that disrespectful. I see it quite differently: I captured his essence, I protest in his voice, and perhaps now a translator might think, “Come, Feng Wenbing, with your beautiful white books, I’ll give you a chance.”
You’ll have to feed Jeff’s Angry Rocket first because it’s not available in print.
I believe there should be a law, a law that allocates a portion of all revenues from books or ebooks more than 50 years old into a fund that benefits writers. Because the alternative that is emerging now is inhumane and cruel: I don’t want my poems to serve future fascists.
That is why protests like this are important. But in the writing world, it always remains eerily silent. People seem so concerned with their own immortality that they’d allow it to serve any executioner. All these faces recklessly grazing past each other. And soon no one will know what a human has written.
Martijn 22-09-2024